Sony Admits to Mistake Regarding Demon’s Souls

It’s rare for game publishers to admit when they have made a mistake. That being said, it’s even rarer for Sony to do so. I’m sure all of us remember when the PS3 launched with a controller lacking in rumble support, and Sony executives insisted that this feature added nothing to the gaming experience.

However, occasionally game publishers will see the light and give themselves the facepalm the rest of the industry usually does.

According to 1UP, in this case it took one of the sleeper hits of 2009 to get Sony to admit to a pretty big blunder. Speaking at GDC 2010 on the subject of localization, Yeonkyung Kim admitted that Sony missed out on taking full advantage of Demon’s Souls. Even though both Sony Europe and America passed on publishing Demon’s Souls due to concerns about the difficulty, Atlus chose to pick up the dark medieval RPG and recently reported a 578% year on year increase in profits thanks in part to that decision.

One can only hope that concerns about localization in the West as well as in the East become less of an issue in the future. It would be nice to see fewer situations like this or with Yakuza 4, which is gearing up for release in Japan while the third chapter has only just dropped here in North America.

One would think that given the financial issues the industry has experienced over the last 18 months, that getting good games into the hands of gamers should not be an issue. As a corollary to this, the initial distribution order for Demon’s Souls was for a mere 15,000 copies and the game is fast approaching 250,000 units sold. I’m pretty sure Sony could have used a bigger slice of that pie.

Via: MCV